A Genetic Quest for Better Chocolate

Wednesday

Jun 25, 2008 at 12:01 AMJun 26, 2008 at 3:43 AM

Mars and I.B.M. are collaborating on a five-year project to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome.

STEVE LOHR

At a time when world food prices are soaring and the hungry are protesting in the streets in developing nations, the challenges of growing cocoa, the key ingredient in chocolate, might seem no great priority.

But Mars, the giant candy maker (think M&M's and Snickers bars), takes cocoa very seriously. Tropical diseases, pests and climate change, Mars says, are among the threats -- not only to the globe's collective sweet tooth but also to the livelihood of more than 6.5 million cocoa growers, mostly families working their small farms, about 70 percent in Africa.

So to protect its long-term supplies and help sustain cocoa farmers, Mars approached researchers at the United States Department of Agriculture and then sought big-time computing firepower at I.B.M. Labs. The result, to be formally announced Thursday, is a five-year project to sequence and analyze the entire cocoa genome.

The goal is to deploy the most advanced tools of computational biology to discover the genetic building blocks of traits like disease and pest resistance, drought tolerance and perhaps flavor. The potential payoff is not just discovery but also faster improvements in cocoa crops, said Howard-Yana Shapiro, global director of plant science at Mars, in a telephone interview Wednesday from Rome, where he was attending a conference at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Computational biologists and supercomputers can drastically accelerate the pace at which promising new strains of cocoa trees come out of the greenhouse, from the traditional length of five to seven years down to 18 months or so, Dr. Shapiro said.

Isidore Rigoutsos, manager of the bioinformatics and pattern discovery group at I.B.M. Labs, explained, "You still need the basic biology and work in the greenhouse, but we can help plant experts zoom in. At the end of the day, the desirable traits being sought in cocoa are all genetic sequences."

Cocoa trees, to be sure, do not grow in the United States. But the government's agriculture agency has a team of experts in breeding tropical plants, and for every dollar of cocoa imported, between one and two dollars of domestic agricultural products are used in making chocolate products. Mars, for example, is the nation's largest purchaser of whole peanuts, as well as a big buyer of milk products and sweeteners.

The results of the research will be freely available to anyone through the Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture.

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